Andrew Sullivan is somewhat recanting his accusation of several days ago against the neocons as being Israel-centric by explaining all the good things that neocons do beside turn Arab societies into charnel houses. I sense a lot of emails. Sullivan's usually crystalline prose seems a little tortured, as though John Podhoretz is driving bamboo splints under his nails:
Israeli right does tend to characterize it accurately, but then again,
much of the Israeli center has moved toward that position as well.
The simple response to this is that despite all their other intellectual claims and long history, neoconservatism has boiled down, in this phase of history, and in light of their greatest act, the greatest disaster in American foreign policy
in at least a generation, to rigid support for American intervention in the Middle East and support for the Israeli occupation, which they don't even call an occupation. On this basis, Jacob Heilbrunn in his neocons book said that even Marty Peretz was a neocon; and neoconservatism is a movement that came out of Jewish life. So does the neocons' other biographer, Murray Friedman. No doubt neocons cared about other things than Israel. No doubt they had non-Jewish fellow travelers. Still do. Van Gogh did a lot of academic drawing and painting. Who remembers that?
(Phil Weiss)
